Transport Canada publishes every vehicle recall twice. Once in English, once in French. The open file carries both as ordinary columns, side by side, and it has done so for fifty years.
Almost nobody reads the second one. The tools that pull this file take the English column and drop the French; the best known of them says so in its own documentation. This site did the same until August 2026, when it started keeping both.
Canada is bilingual by law. Whether its public safety record says the same thing in both languages is a question with an answer sitting in a public file, and as far as we can establish nobody had asked it.
833 recalls have no French at all
Not a poor translation. No translation. The French column holds the words Translation not available, as a value, in the file.
The first row of the record is a Volvo from 1975. The English says the steering shaft nut could loosen. The French says Translation not available.
| Decade | Recalls | No French text |
|---|---|---|
| 1950s | 3 | 2 (67%) |
| 1960s | 19 | 15 (79%) |
| 1970s | 1,028 | 799 (78%) |
| 1980s | 1,636 | 15 (1%) |
| 1990s | 2,358 | 0 (0%) |
| 2000s | 4,328 | 0 (0%) |
| 2010s | 5,536 | 0 (0%) |
| 2020s | 2,921 | 0 (0%) |
This is history, not current practice. It is concentrated in the 1970s and it stops. Every recall recorded since the 1990s carries French. We say that plainly because the alternative is to let a number from forty years ago read as an accusation about today.
Of the 17,012 that have both, 1,860 differ
Each notice is read in both languages for the words that tell you what can happen to you: fire, injury, death, crash, loss of control, no warning. A difference is recorded when one language uses a category of word and the other does not. That is 10.9 per cent of the notices published in both.
| Difference | Recalls |
|---|---|
| warning in English only | 634 |
| control in English only | 272 |
| fire in English only | 243 |
| warning in French only | 175 |
| crash in French only | 144 |
| control in French only | 139 |
| death in French only | 129 |
| injury in English only | 120 |
What that looks like on one recall
On 120 recalls the English names an injury and the French does not. Here is one of them, Canadian recall 2017135, MANAC, 2017-03-10.
English. On certain trailers, the rivets which secure the external aluminium rub rails may shear. If a sufficient number of rivets were to fail, the rub rail could partially or fully separate from the vehicle, posing a risk to other motorists and increasing the risk of a crash causing injury and/or damage to property. Correction: Aluminium rivets will be replaced with stainless steel ones.
French. Les rivets qui fixent les lisses latérales de protection extérieures en aluminium sur certaines remorques pourrait se cisailler. Si un bon nombre de rivets venaient à se cisailler, la lisse latérale pourrait se séparer partiellement ou complètement du véhicule, posant ainsi un risque pour les autres automobilistes et augmentant les risques de collision et/ou de dommages matériels. Mesures correctives : Les rivets en aluminium doivent être remplacés par des rivets en acier inoxydable.
The French is not shorter. On this recall it runs 130 per cent of the length of the English. It is a different sentence, not a truncated one, and that is why this example was chosen: the obvious objection is that the French was cut off, and here it was not.
What this is not
It is not a claim that anything was mistranslated. A difference here means one language used a word from our list and the other did not. Our list can be wrong, and it has been.
The first version of this comparison reported that 43 per cent of recalls differed. That number was wrong, and every step down from it was a defect we found in our own word list rather than a change in the record:
- stall matched installed, which nearly every recall says. One careless term produced 4,261 of the 7,296 differences in the first pass.
- feu matched feux. Brake lights are not fires.
- choc matched choc electrique, which is an electric shock.
- ignit matched ignition, which in a car is the switch you turn.
- The French for a death is often pertes de vie, which our list did not hold. Adding it took one category from 871 recalls to 74.
- Worst of all, blesse did not match blessant. A French notice saying an accident blessant quelqu un, injuring somebody, was recorded as not mentioning injury at all. That single missing stem was 692 of the recalls this page previously counted, and it was caught because the first example this page chose for itself turned out to disprove the point it was chosen to make.
- On 30 August a third reading of the pairs found more of the same shape: the register writes risque d un feu where the list held risque de feu, and le conducteur perde le controle, the verb where the list held only the noun and the infinitive. And unintended, which the French register renders as intempestif or involontaire, neither of which any list held.
- One correction made a number rise rather than fall, which is worth being plain about. The early register says without prior warning, which the fixed phrase without warning never matched. Catching it revealed hundreds of notices, mostly from the 1980s, whose French simply drops that clause. Recall 1981087 ends, in English, loss of vehicle control and vehicle crash without prior warning; the French ends at the accident.
43 per cent became 10.9. The first number a method produces is mostly a measurement of the method, and publishing that story is part of publishing the result.
The word lists are published in full at the engine status route. If a word is missing, that is a fault in this page and we would like to be told.
Where the numbers come from
- Transport Canada, Vehicle Recalls Database, the full monthly open file, columns COMMENT_ETXT and COMMENT_FTXT.
- 17,845 distinct recalls, 1975-01-01 to 2026-08-31. The file is read end to end, four megabytes at a time, and re-read weekly.
- Every pair that differs is published with both texts at the cases route, so the judgement can be read rather than taken on trust.
- The filings belong to Transport Canada. The comparison, the counting, and any mistake in them are ours.
Built 9 September 2026. Corrections go on the corrections page.
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